Used Tools & Technologies
Not specified
Required Skills & Competences
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value.
About proficiency levels:
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
Linux @ 6
Python @ 6
Statistics @ 2
Machine Learning @ 3
Data Science @ 2
Hiring @ 3
Networking @ 6
Rust @ 6
Android @ 6
Debugging @ 6
Experimentation @ 2
iOS @ 6
AI @ 3
Profiling @ 3
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
Details
About the Team
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Consumer Devices team is building a new generation of AI-powered products that seamlessly integrate hardware and software to create intuitive, transformative experiences. The team brings together experts across embedded systems, machine learning, hardware, design, and product engineering to develop products at the intersection of AI and consumer technology.
About the Role
OpenAI is seeking a System Performance Engineer to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across embedded hardware products. You will work across operating systems, applications, camera and vision, graphics, and platform teams to define product KPIs, build performance tooling, and drive optimizations from early lab characterization through product launch and real-world usage. The role requires deep expertise in embedded or high-performance systems, strong operating systems fundamentals, and hands-on experience debugging under tight latency, power, and memory constraints. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid model (four days per week in the office and one day remote). Relocation assistance is available for new hires.
Responsibilities
- Develop system performance benchmarks, methodologies, and policies to evaluate end-to-end product behavior.
- Profile and analyze performance across key product use cases and workloads using custom and industry-standard profiling tools.
- Partner closely with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and drive performance optimizations across the software stack.
- Define high-level product KPIs and establish measurement frameworks to measure launch readiness and monitor performance throughout the product lifecycle.
- Measure, report, and track metrics including system responsiveness, memory utilization, cold boot performance, long-term stability, and behavior under constrained conditions such as thermal limits and low battery states.
- Investigate field performance regressions and drive issues to resolution using data-driven analysis.
Requirements
- Deep experience shipping embedded or high-performance systems on Linux, Android, or iOS devices.
- Strong proficiency in C/C++, Python, or Rust, with exceptional operating systems fundamentals including process management, IPC, drivers, interrupts, power management, media frameworks, graphics, filesystems, and networking.
- Proven track record shipping real-time systems operating under tight latency, power, and memory constraints.
- Expertise with profiling and debugging tools such as Perfetto, GDB, LLDB, perf, ftrace, or Instruments.
- Experience building instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning frameworks.
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with statistics, experimentation methodologies, or data science concepts.
- Experience collaborating cross-functionally with embedded software, systems, camera and vision, audio, graphics, applications, and hardware teams.
- Experience defining product KPIs, benchmarking methodologies, and launch readiness metrics for hardware products.
- Experience investigating field performance regressions and driving fixes through cross-functional collaboration.
Benefits
- Base pay range listed for this role may vary depending on factors including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Total compensation includes equity and performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
- 401(k) with employer match.
- Paid parental leave and paid medical and caregiver leave.
- Paid time off (flexible PTO for exempt employees; up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees).
- 13+ paid company holidays and additional company office closures.
- Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
- Annual learning and development stipend.
- Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
- Relocation support for eligible employees.
- Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diverse perspectives, and inclusive hiring and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.